Quinoa Cantaloupe Pudding – A quick and easy dessert!

Quinoa is very versatile and I have used it in a variety of savory dishes! But I have struggled a little to use it for desserts 🙁 I don’t like using a lot of sugar or butter in my recipes so it takes a lot of trials for me to come up with a dessert that fits my expectations in terms of taste and ingredients! I also like dessert recipes that can simply double as a quick guilt-free healthy snack too. I think I have a winner recipe here that fits everything I wanted!

This is a super easy, quick recipe and you really don’t need any special reason to whip this up! This also provides more nutrition than the traditional rice pudding I think. For this pudding I have combined cantaloupe with quinoa to add some natural sweetness. Almonds and milk give this pudding a nice texture. I think you can still taste the cantaloupe at the end of every bite, so you really need to love the fruit to enjoy this pudding 🙂

Ingredients

1/4 cup raw quinoa

400 grams of cantaloupe cut roughly into medium sized pieces

1/4 cup skim milk

About 10 almonds for grinding and a couple more for garnishing ( You can add other nuts too – but almonds just go so well with this!)

Handful of raisins/cashews for garnishing (optional)

2 tbsp sugar (you might need more or less depending on the sweetness of the fruit – you can use any kind of sweetener you like)

1 tsp oil

Preparation Time: 10 min

Cooking Time: 20 min

Servings: 2-3

Method

Wash the quinoa thoroughly with cold water a few times. Then take 1/2 cup water in a saucepan and add quinoa to it. Let it cook on medium heat. It will take about 15 minutes for the quinoa to be cooked, you can know it because of the white strands on each grain.

Meanwhile, take a saucepan and add some water to it. Let it come to a boil. Then add about 10 almonds to the boiling water, strain it and peel the almonds. Add the cut fruit and almonds to a blender and purée well.

Chop the nuts you want for garnishing. Dry the pan you used to boil water and add a tsp of oil to it. Let it heat up. Once it is hot, add the chopped nuts and raisins. Sauté for a few minutes till the nuts brown slightly and the raisins puff up. Then take these out onto another plate.

In the same pan add the milk and fruit purée and cook on slow heat for 5 to 10 minutes. Let it reduce in quantity a little. Then add the cooked quinoa to this. Before adding just fluff the quinoa grains with a fork to kind of separate them. Let the whole mixture cook together for another 5 to 10 minutes till all the milk evaporates and you get a good consistency. Taste the pudding for sweetness – at this point, I added 2 tbsp of sugar. After that I mixed every thing and cooked for a few minutes.

Served hot or chilled. Garnish with the nuts and raisins you set aside!